How we can make the transition from passive consumers to active producers.

What are you most looking forward to at the FAIR?

Learning. It's like taking a semester-long program in sensible living crammed into two days of great speakers.

Tell us about your background with your particular topic.

As a journalist who wrote often about the environment, one day I decided to get more involved in actually shaping it. So I went back to grad school to get a masters degree in Landscape Architecture. During those three years I gradually developed the idea that the solution to our ecological problems were too important to be left to the politicians and planners and developers and so-called experts. It had to come from us, which increasingly means us city folks. More people will get involved and work together to reshape the planet, if they care about their own environment. The best way I know to make that happen is to help them plant it.

Why should fairgoers attend your presentation?

We'll be giving away free cars. Oh. What? No cars this year? Never mind. Doesn't mean we can't have some fun while we save the planet.

How will you get to the FAIR, and how far do you have to travel?

I shall be travelling the 140 miles from Vancouver, B.C., in the most environmentally-friendly way I know: wooden-wheeled ox cart pulled by a team of free-range urban chickens. (Actually I don't know...still some logistics to work out with the New Society Publishers folks.)

What advice do you have for attendees?

Don't hurry. Immerse in the session you're at rather than fret about what you might be missing.

If you were stranded on a deserted island and could have only one thing, what would you choose?

A vat full of supermodels who can also serve as mechanical engineers to fix the continent-sized yacht I'm also putting on the list.

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